Rain: a free lace knitting stitch pattern

Each month, my backers on Patreon suggest words to me that I might encode into numbers, chart on a grid, and turn into lace or other stitch patterns. Then I use a random number generator to pick one word, and publish the resulting stitch pattern on the first day of the next month. This month, the RNG brings us rain, sent in by Meagan. Would you like to support me and propose words?

I tried three different chart layouts and resulting test swatches for rain. The first two were all right, but I couldn’t help feeling that there was something better yet to come. The swatch for the third chart made me laugh with surprise: it looks like aspen leaves! Leaves are ubiquitous in knitted lace, but I wasn’t expecting to have something come out of my methods that looked so deliberate. In a way, it’s like an extra layer of code, since leaves don’t look like rain. Though plants need water, so that seems apt too.

click to enlarge

Notes:

This is a stitch pattern such as might be found in a stitch dictionary. It is not a pattern for a finished object. You will need to add selvedges or some other form of knitted stitches to either side.

Rain is a multiple of 12+1 stitches and 16 rows.

On wrong side/even-numbered rows, purl across, working (k1, p1) in each double yo.

I worked the stitch pattern so it is offset halfway on every other repeat; the horizontal boundary in the chart shows where this happens. The pattern might also look nice without the offset: try repeating just rows 1-8.

Designers, please feel free to use this stitch in your patterns. I’d like credit but won’t be offended if people don’t give it.

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Abbreviations:

CDD: centered double decrease: slip the next 2 stitches as if to knit 2 together, knit the next stitch, then pass the 2 slipped stitches over the third.

DSD: double slip decrease: ssk, slip the resulting stitch back to the left needle, pass the next stitch over, then slip the result. (Right-leaning double decrease. Substitute k3tog if desired; they are similar but don’t look quite the same.)

k: knit.

k2tog: knit 2 stitches together as if they were 1. (Right-leaning decrease)

k3tog: knit 3 stitches together as if they were 1. (Right-leaning double decrease)

As with Melancholy, I’m showing the mirrored grid because I did things a little differently with this. Ignore the section with light grey squares and the column of blue stitches for now.

I started in the bottom right corner, as if knitting. The letter R is 24. I counted 2 squares then marked the next square with black. I counted 1, 2, 3, and because there wasn’t room for 4, I jumped up to the next row. There I counted the fourth square, and marked the next one. The letter A is 01. For zero, I counted no squares and simply marked the next square with black, and so on. The last four squares aren’t part of the code, and don’t need to be considered by someone trying to decode this because there are no squares to the left of them.

Because the leftmost column has no stitches in it, I decided not to double it in the mirroring. And because I wanted to avoid quadruple yarnovers, I added a column to go between repeats; I usually like to made added columns purl to indicate that they’re not part of the code, but that didn’t work out for this case. I marked the added stitches with blue on the chart (which would really be more useful as code in any case).

Once I had the squares arranged to my satisfaction, I replaced black squares with yarn overs and started swatching to figure out where to put decreases. In the end, I turned the chart upside down:

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Free Technique PDFs

Some of my patterns mention PDFs that have explanations for certain techniques used in the patterns. Here are the PDFs. I've described more techniques not used in my patterns in various blog posts, but I don't have them in PDF format. (I could be persuaded to do so.)